Please answer question 4.

SharpScholar: Lessons Learned from a Failed EdTech Start-up SharpScholar was started by Jawwad Siddiqui and some friends. Siddiqui was a junior at his university and was dissatisfied with the varying quality of instruction in his classes. SharpScholar was a software platform designed to better connect students and teachers. For teachers, it allowed them to upload content, add interaction, engage students, collect analytics on what was being learned and what was being missed, and improve their teaching. For the student, the platform acted as a coach so they could learn the material and come to class prepared. At its peak, SharpScholar had 5,000 students, five top universities in Canada, and 12 professors signed on. The service received plenty of attention. The founders appeared on Dragons' Den, Canada's equivalent of Shark Tank. They were offered a $100,000 investment for a 15 percent stake in the company, but turned it down. They won awards, got accepted into a prestigious incubator, and interacted with people at the Khan Academy, GoogleX, and other high-profile organizations. Yet, after only two years in business, SharpScholar shut down. What went wrong? In a thoughtful blog post titled "We Shut Down Our Edtech Startup. Here's What We Learned," Siddiqui offered four pieces of advice for entrepreneurs based on SharpScholar's failure: Have a Direct Relationship with Your "Customer" SharpScholar struggled to identify its customer. Was it the student, the teacher, the school administration, the government? They were all intertwined. This meant if a teacher liked the product he or she would have to keep in mind the student, the budget, the school policy, and even get approval from administration. This factor complicated SharpScholar's relationship with the teacher. It also resulted in a lack of focus with respect to for whom the firm was tailoring its product. Lesson Learned: Teachers (and others) don't like to use tools that require different layers of approval from others. Make products that do not require multiple layers of approval to be purchased. Don't Confuse Your Customers, Consumers, and Capacity to Pay In most industries, the person who pays for a product is the one who uses it. This is often not true in education. The person who uses the product (teacher and/or student) is often not the one who pays for it. Teachers sometimes have budgets-but not always. Parent groups and nonprofit organizations sometimes help-but that is hit and miss. Funding from school districts for technology products varies dramatically from district to district. Lesson Learned: A business model that relies on a different person or entity to pay for a product than the one who uses it is a challenging model. Beware the Priority Gap between You and Your Customer Teachers and entrepreneurs have priorities that don't always align. An entrepreneur that has a technology product to sell wants to close the sale and get the product in the classroom. Teachers think about setup time, how much effort it will take to learn and integrate the tool into their lessons, what to do about kids who lack access to a smartphone (if the tool is an app), and so forth. Lesson Learned: Entrepreneurs want to make sales and grow their businesses. Teachers want to take their time. This gap can be so large it causes an edtech start-up to fail. We're Used to Free The flood of free tools-from Facebook to Google to Dropbox (basic version) to Google Docs-has primed people to expect certain services to be free. In addition, many big companies that make their money from consumers and businesses offer educational versions of the product for free or at deep discounts. Lesson Learned: Many target customers in the education space (and other spaces) expect products to be free. So, when you're thinking about launching a company ask yourself the following questions about the industry you are about to enter. How many layers of approval will my product experience prior to the purchase decision being made? Is the person who pays for my product the one who uses it? Will the priorities of my company be so different than the priorities of my customer that I could fail? And finally, how accustomed are my customers to getting products similar to mine for free? Questions for Critical Thinking 1. What lessons does SharpScholar's failure have for entrepreneurs who are considering entering the EdTech industry? 2. We studied business models in Chapter 4 . Would you classify SharpScholar's business model as standard or disruptive? What types of execution-related challenges are associated with the type of business model you believe SharpScholar sought to implement? 3. As explained in this feature, SharpScholar did not have a precise image of who was the firm's target customer. Examine the "bargaining power of buyers" from the perspective of the different customers mentioned in the feature who may have been SharpScholar's target customer. Which of the potential target customers would possess the greatest amount of buyer power relative to SharpScholar and why? 4. What actions could SharpScholar have taken, throughout the life of its business, that may have enabled it to remain competitive and still be a successful firm today